A car bomb killed a police officer in Benghazi early on Wednesday, a police source said, the second attack on the eastern city’s security forces in two days.
Like much of the country, Benghazi - cradle of the popular revolt that overthrew Muammar Gaddafi more than a year ago - is awash with weapons. Libya’s government has struggled to control rival armed factions there ever since the uprising, Reuters reported.
Attacks on British, Italian, Red Cross and United Nations properties and personnel there in the past year highlight the precarious security in the North African state.
Wednesday’s attack killed Salah Al-Wizry as he arrived home late at night.
“He was killed in front of his house by a bomb planted in his vehicle,” a police source said.
On Monday, at least one police officer was wounded when attackers threw a grenade at a patrol car in Benghazi. On Tuesday, Italy - the former colonial power in Libya - suspended activity at its consulate in the city, Libya’s second biggest, and withdrew staff for security reasons after a gun attack on its consul at the weekend.
Unidentified gunmen opened fire on Guido De Sanctis’s armored car. He was unhurt but the attack was a reminder of the September 11 attack on the US mission there that killed the ambassador and three other Americans.
American officials say militants with ties to Al-Qaeda affiliates were most likely involved in that attack.
To keep a degree of order, Libya’s government relies on numerous militias made up of thousands of Libyans who took up arms against Gaddafi. The groups provide what passes for official security but also what poses the main threat to it.
In November, the city’s police chief was shot dead and attacks on police officers and buildings are frequent.

Syria Bombings Claim 24 Lives

A triple car bombing killed at least 22 people in northern Syria on Wednesday, a government official and activists said, a day after massive blasts at a university campus in the city of Aleppo left 87 dead.
It was not immediately clear what the target of the three almost simultaneous blasts in the city of Idlib was.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the bombings targeted security vehicles near the local security headquarters and a checkpoint. At least 24 people were killed, most of them regime forces, it said.
However, a government official said the blasts hit a major highway and a roundabout in Idlib, killing 22 people and wounding 35. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief the media, did not say what the target was.
Rebels control vast areas of the Idlib countryside, but the city itself is controlled by the regime.
The bombings in Idlib come on the heels of the twin blasts a day earlier that ripped through the Aleppo University campus, which anti-regime activists said killed 87 people.
The Observatory said the death toll could rise even further because medics have collected unidentified body parts and some of the more than 150 wounded are in critical condition.
Syria’s Ministry of Higher Education suspended classes and exams at all Syrian universities on Wednesday, “in mourning for the souls of the heroic martyrs who were assassinated by the treacherous terrorist hand,” the state news service reported.
The SANA report quoted the minister of higher education, Mahmoud Mualla, as saying that Assad had ordered the reconstruction of Aleppo University “with the utmost speed.”
Activists said forces loyal to President Bashar Assad launched two airstrikes on the area at the time of the blasts, while Syrian state media said a “terrorist group” hit it with two rockets.
The scale of destruction appeared inconsistent with the rockets the rebels are known to possess.
Aleppo has been the focus of a violent struggle for control since rebel forces pushed in and began clashing with government troops last summer.
The university is in the city’s west, a sector still controlled by the government. Both activists and the Assad regime said those killed in Tuesday’s blasts were mostly students taking their mid-year exams and civilians who sought refuge in the university dorms after fleeing violence elsewhere.
On Tuesday, Syria’s UN Ambassador Bashar Ja’afari told a Security Council meeting on combating terrorism that “a cowardly terrorist act targeted the students of Aleppo University” as they sat for their mid-terms. He said 82 students were killed and 152 were wounded.
Syria’s crisis began with protests in March 2011 but quickly descended into a full-blown civil war, with scores of rebel groups across the country fighting Assad’s forces.
Syria’s Ministry of Higher Education suspended classes and exams at all Syrian universities on Wednesday, “in mourning for the souls of the heroic martyrs who were assassinated by the treacherous terrorist hand,” the state news service reported.

Iraq Attacks Leave 31 Dead

From Page 1
The KDP is led by Massoud Barzani, the president of Iraq’s largely autonomous Kurdish region, who has frequently sparred with Iraq’s central government in Baghdad.
The deputy police chief in the city of Kirkuk, Maj. Gen. Torhan Abdul-Rahman Youssef, said 11 people were killed in that attack. Another car bomb that exploded nearby killed another two people. Just over 100 were wounded in the two attacks, he said.
Kirkuk, 290 kilometers (180 miles) north of Baghdad, is home to a mix of Arabs, Kurds and Turkomen, who all have competing claims to the oil-rich area. The Kurds want to incorporate it into their self-ruled region in Iraq’s north, but Arabs and Turkomen are opposed.
The city is at the heart of a snaking swath of territory disputed between the Kurds, who have their own armed fighting force, and Iraq’s central government.
A shootout in Tuz Khormato, another contested town along the disputed area, prompted both sides to rush troops and heavy weapons to the area in November.
On Wednesday, yet another car bomb struck the local headquarters for Kurdish security forces in Tuz Khormato, killing five and wounding 36, according to Raed Ibrahim, the head of the provincial health directorate. The town is about 210 kilometers (130 miles) north of Baghdad.
The attacks came as hundreds of mourners gathered in the western city of Fallujah to bury a prominent Sunni lawmaker assassinated by a suicide bomber on Tuesday.
The politician, Ifan Saadoun Al-Issawi, was part of the Sunni-backed Iraqiya bloc, which holds some posts in Iraq’s loose power-sharing government but is at the same time the main force in opposition to Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki’s administration. He was also a founder of the local branch of the Sahwa, a group of Sunni Arabs who joined forces with the US military to fight Al-Qaeda at the height of Iraq’s insurgency.
Fallujah and the nearby city of Ramadi have been the scene of more than three weeks of demonstrations against the government.
A planted bomb went off as mourners gathered to mark Al-Issawi’s death, wounding three of them, authorities said. Violent attacks hit other parts of the country as well.
In Baghdad, gunmen using silenced weapons killed three policemen as they were sitting in their police car, according to police and hospital officials. A roadside bomb hit a police patrol on a highway in eastern Baghdad, killing two policemen, officials said.
One policeman was killed and four others wounded when a roadside bomb struck their car in Hawija, 240 kilometers (160 miles) north of Baghdad, according to authorities.
The officials providing details of the attacks outside the disputed areas spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to release the information to reporters.

Israeli Watchdog Rips Netanyahu Over Settlements

A review of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s settlement policies shows a clear intent to prevent the creation of a viable Palestinian state by stepping up construction in strategic areas, an Israeli anti-settlement group said on Wednesday.
During Netanyahu’s four-year term, 38 percent of nearly 6,900 West Bank construction starts were reported in settlements deep inside the territory, compared to 20 percent under his predecessors, the Peace Now group said.
The report by the watchdog was released a week before Israel’s parliamentary elections, which Netanyahu appears poised to win.
According to the report, the regime also issued bids for 5,302 settlement apartments in the West Bank and East Beit-ul-Moqaddas and advanced planning for thousands more, the group said. The group’s findings were based on aerial photos, field visits and official reports.
The latest bids were issued on Tuesday, when the regime asked developers to compete to build 84 apartments in Kiryat Arba, a settlement near the West Bank city of Hebron, and 114 in Efrat, a major settlement south of Beit-ul-Moqaddas.
The Palestinians want the West Bank, Gaza and East Beit-ul-Moqaddas, captured by Israel in 1967, for a future state. In November, the UN General Assembly recognized a state of Palestine in these borders, over Israel’s objections.
Israel still occupies the West Bank and East Beit-ul-Moqaddas and while it withdrew settlers and soldiers from Gaza, it controls most access to the coastal territory.

Rejecting Settlement Freeze
Netanyahu has said he’s willing to negotiate the borders of a Palestinian state, but wants to keep East Beit-ul-Moqaddas--the hoped-for capital of the Palestinians--and chunks of the West Bank. Netanyahu has rejected a Palestinian demand for a settlement freeze during negotiations, and talks have been on hold for the past four years.
Polls ahead of the Jan. 22 vote indicate Netanyahu is poised to win another four-year term.
Peace Now concluded that Netanyahu’s policies in his first term “disclose a clear intention to use settlements to systematically undermine and render impossible a realistic, viable two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
Israeli regime’s spokesman Mark Regev denied the regime is trying to undermine prospects for Palestinian statehood through settlement expansion.
Israel has “allowed construction in the Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem and in the settlement blocs, areas that will remain part of Israel in any future peace agreement,” he said.
Israel hasn’t clearly defined settlement blocs, but they are believed to include larger settlements near Israel as well the Ariel enclave of 17,000 settlers in the heart of the West Bank. In all, about half a million Israelis live in dozens of settlements on war-won land, including nearly 200,000 in East Beit-ul-Moqaddas and more than 300,000 in the West Bank.
Asked to comment on Peace Now’s report of a sharp construction increase in more remote settlements, Regev said: “I don’t know that figure to be true.”

Tacit Approval
The Peace Now report said settlers in some of the more remote settlements built without approved plans or permits, but “with the tacit approval of the Netanyahu government.”
In all, construction began on 6,867 apartments in West Bank settlements since Netanyahu took office in March 2009, the report said.
Thirty-eight of those apartments were located in Jewish enclaves east of Israel’s separation barrier in the West Bank, proposed by some in Israel--though not by Netanyahu--as a future border with the Palestinians.
Israel began building the barrier in 2002, portraying it as a defense against Palestinian fighters who had killed hundreds of Israelis in an armed uprising. However, it meanders through the West Bank to scoop up Jewish settlements on the Israeli side, prompting allegations of a land grab under the guise of security.
Thirty-two percent of construction starts were west of the barrier, and close to 30 percent in areas where the route of the barrier is not final, the report said. The report said the count is not complete, and that the final figure is expected to be higher.
Although Netanyahu outdid his predecessors in terms of launching settlement construction deep inside the West Bank, Peace Now researcher Hagit Ofran said the annual average of construction starts in the Palestinian territory was slightly lower under Netanyahu than under his predecessor, Ehud Olmert.

Gunmen Kill Security Official South of Yemen’s Sanaa

Gunmen killed the deputy security chief of Dhamar province, south of the Yemeni capital Sana’a, an interior ministry official said, less than a month after an adviser to the minister of defense was shot dead in Sana’a.
“Two gunmen riding a motor bike shot Brigadier Abdulwahab Al-Mushki and killed him immediately,” the official said.
On December 25, gunmen and bombers targeted three senior military officers and the transport minister in a series of attacks in the capital.
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which is based in Yemen, is seen by US officials as the most dangerous offshoot of the militant network.
Yemen’s location next to top oil producer Saudi Arabia and major shipping lanes has made restoring its stability an international priority.

Egypt Apartment Collapse

At least 14 people were killed in Egypt on Wednesday when an apartment block collapsed in Alexandria, a day after derailment of a train in the country killed 19 soldiers.